The Dark Tower

by Jeff Baker

All the kids on my street knew the old grain elevator was haunted, especially around Christmas.

The street stretched into a dirt and gravel road with a gully and overgrown weeds on either side and the grain elevator on a patch of fenced-in land at the end of the road. It was outdated and never really used except in December when the town lit up a Christmas star made up of multicolored lights at the top which helped it dominate the evening sky in the last month of the year.

My Aunt, who visited us for the holidays from Wichita, thought it was sweet.

“Reminds me of Christmas when I was a little girl,” she would say.

My friends and I thought it was just plain spooky. We called it “The Tower.”

Sometimes, my Aunt would stand on the front porch and look over at the tower and sing Christmas songs about the Star of Bethlehem, like she was serenading it. Like I said, Spooky.

Old Man Corcoran, who must have been around fifty, was the one who turned the star on every evening at dusk. He would drive down in his battered pickup, unlock the gate of the wire mesh fence and go into the grain elevator to flip the switch. One night, right before Christmas, my buddy Jerome and I decided to go inside the tower. It was a warm evening for December and our folks thought we were playing one of those new video games in Jerome’s room.

It was the early Eighties. We were eleven.

We took our bikes and made it out to the tower before Old Man Corcoran got there. We hid behind some bushes across the road from the fence and watched as he opened the gate and went in to the tower. While he was inside we ran in through the gate and hid behind a corner of the tower, waiting for our chance to sneak in. But instead we had to stay hidden when Corcoran stepped out of the tower, glanced up to see that the star was lit and closed the gate and drove off.

I’m still not sure why we didn’t just jump out and tell him we were there. Maybe we thought we’d get in trouble. As it was, we were locked inside the gate. We glanced up at the star which looked like a big flat line of red, green and blue and walked around the tower.

And then in the growing dark a tall rectangle of shadow, twice as tall as a man, emerged and started moving towards us. It wasn’t a shadow being cast by anything or somebody in some kind of black drapery. It was just a shadow. Dark. Inexorable. Looking like the open mouth of some thing.

Jerome and I ran, somehow finding an old metal drum that may have had oil or gas in it at one time, standing empty by the fence. We climbed on top of it and puled ourselves up the rest of the way on the wire mesh fence. We climbed faster than we ever had in Gym Class. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence but we wouldn’t have cared if there was. We made it down the other side and ran for our bikes, images of the shadowy thing gliding up to the fence and passing through coming after us.

We were halfway home before I glanced back and saw we weren’t being followed.

My Mom asked me how my pants got ripped and I told her Jerome and I had been playing outside. Which we sort of had been. She wasn’t that upset. She always made me change out of the clothes I wore to school when I got home and for once I was glad if it kept her from being upset. I don’t remember what Jerome’s Mom did or if our folks ever found out where we’d been but I do know that the town put barbed wire at the top of the fence early that next year.

And some nights when I am dozing off I see that tall dark tower, star shining in the twilight. Except the tower turns to watch me with its starry eye and then the tall shadow moves between me and the star, coming closer, closer…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you enjoyed this spooky Christmas story. Taking a break for the Holidays but I may have something special for New Year’s Week.

I’ll be back with another prompt pic in early January.

——jeff